CSECL & ACLE Joint Lecture: Prof. Christine Desan (Harvard Law School)

The modern approach to the market as a place with autonomy depends on a certain view of money. According to that view, money is a neutral technology that expresses individual choices made about real goods and services. But the controversies over money that regularly arise in political communities reveal that money is far from a transparent medium. It is a legal project that structures economic activity. Money literally makes the market.

The article extracts a definition of money from the most recent controversy over it. That controversy, the debate over safe assets, suggests that moneys overwhelmingly share a particular character: they are made of sovereign debt, short-term IOUs, that are enabled to act as cash by the sovereign who issues them. The article constructs a thought experiment to illuminate exactly why governments would create money according to this pattern.

The article explores each of these qualities -- the identity of money as sovereign debt and its enhancement as cash -- because each of them represents an initiative that fundamentally reconfigures a society’s political economy. In that moment, money departs its reputation as a neutral technology and the market loses its claim as the product of private choice. To the contrary, economic exchange depends on a medium made in law and travels within the channels that medium enables through law.

Registration: register via email at csecl-fdr@uva.nl
Additional information: https://www.uva.nl/en/shared-content/subsites/centre-for-the-study-of-european-contract-law/en/events/conferences/2019/12/christine-desan.html?origin=yiD0tqAUS6W8WVuh7rCWcg